Friday, January 4, 2013

SWN Campaign: Part III

Having discovered that the cyberpunk planet of Guangxi was actually an elaborate game played by a cabal of secretive AIs, the players got a little squeamish and decided to try their fortunes elsewhere. Aboard their ship is an AI who decided to escape the endless chess game against his "uncles" and has confined himself to an Echo-class armature.

For the time being, the characters have returned to the Hydrin Fleet to plot their next venture. The Fleet has turned out to be a home base/staging area for the PCs to return to between legs of the campaign.

The first leg of the campaign was based off of Kevin Crawford's excellent Hard Light module, available on DriveThru. It was pretty heavily dungeon delve-based. (The PCs weren't all that interested in the political situation on Brightside, though they did sort of end up resolving it inadvertently.) The second leg of the game, now concluded, was very much like a mini-campaign of Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun. (Well, less Shadowrun, since there weren't fantasy races and magic and whatnot.) What, I wonder, will the third leg bring?

The PCs could stay in Atragon sector and work for the Clans for a time as they endlessly play the middle in the war between the haughty Arcanian League and the scheming Technocratic Unions of Runaris. The PCs could search through the resource-laden but hazardous tomb worlds that the aforementioned polities fight over.

The PCs could go back to Ceres and get involved in the war between the expanding Empire of Galaran and the nascent Entente of Four Worlds. They could find adventure on any of the independent worlds that refuse to join the Entente and refuse to submit to the Empire. In the further reaches of the sector, news spreads of a hochog warlord who claims to have found the long-lost hochog homeworld and claimed dominion over it.

The PCs could venture into Dark Space, guided only by the coordinates of a mysterious Ushan structure, lost for millenniums unknown, that sent them a garbled message when contacted.

And let us not forget the strange alien they bested in the wastelands on Guangxi. After trying to salvage the wreck of its strange craft, the PCs were alarmed to find that the craft bore on it the Seal of the Dragon- a symbol of the inscrutable ancient enemy who, according to legend, destroyed the original Hydrin homeworld and set them adrift in the stars.

These are just a few of the options. There are many adjacent sectors of space into which they can venture. We'll see what happens next Tuesday.